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User blog:ZyLogic/Beyond Good
Greetings IRIS operatives, Unfortunately, Beyond Good & Evil 2 was not shown this year at E3. Yet hope remains if we stand together. Recently, I ,and several other people around the network, have stumbled upon a way to rip various data from Beyond Good & Evil that could further increase the quality of our contents on our database. These include sound files and textures that otherwise would be problematic to capture by conventional means. However, I also, as of late, have been very occupied with the vast amount of beta elements that were shown of Beyond Good & Evil prior to its release in november of 2003. As of late, we thought these beta elements were lost and never to be found in the game. This however, has been proven wrong by various software that has allowed users to delve into the games files, and also explore certain cutscenes from different perspectives (more of that later in the blog). If you are the kind of person that wants this wiki to succeed, I definitely recommend you to try and use these methods to increase the quality of our content unlike anything seen before. Sound files Although this software has been released for several years, it has been interesting to listen to all sound files and try and find certain unused sound files (which luckily exist.) The reason why this software can prove so important to the wiki, is because, in essence, every single sound that occurs in Beyond Good & Evil can be listened to; this includes dialogues, sound effects and the music soundtracks. We can also rip mdisks sound files from the game to use on our own pages (see here ). Tutorial If you want to explore the files on your own, there are a few prerequisites: *A legit copy of Beyond Good & Evil on the PC. *The BFExtractorGUI software. I would recommend to use the second download, as it attempts to deliver a decent user interface. Once you downloaded the BFExtractor, you want to go run it (may require admin rights) and click on 'FILE' in the top-left corner of the window and select 'Set archive'. You will have to browse to the directory where you installed Beyond Good & Evil and it will search for the Sally_clean.bf file. Once this has been found, open it. Once the archive has been set, you want to click on 'Get Listing' and it will show all files within the sally_clean.bf file. This is where all sound files, supposedly textures, gameplay programming and cutscene data is stored. From here, you can select all files and click 'Extract Files'. Besure to mark "convert WAV PCM", otherwise the extracted files will be become unreadable for a lot of media players. From here, you may listen to all these files, and see if you can use it to increase our wiki. It might also be interesting to take not of how certain data files are labeled. Most notably, the sound files that are used during the debriefings of the IRIS Network refer to SPOON (the beta name for the IRIS Network). Video files (.BIK Files) BIK files are created with the use of BINK Video applications created by RAD Game Tools. This tool allows game developers to create full-motion video sequences. In Beyond Good & Evil, this was primarily used to create the video advertisements portraying General Kehck speaking to the Hillyan citizenry. Though only a handful of .bik files are present within the game files, it is interesting to take a look at. A small .bik file titled "video_map_matrix0.bik" shows a beta version of General Kehck speaking to the Hillyans. To watch these files, you have to download a .bik file player such as BIK Player. Once installed, run the applications and click on "File" and "Open..." and browse to the directory where Beyond Good & Evil is installed. This is the same directory you had to browse to to extract the sound files. Textures files It has been proven very difficult to extract the textures from within the directory. Fortunately, a program named "3D Ripper DX" allows us to extract these textures in-game. When download, you want to select the direct executable file for Beyond Good & Evil (BGE.exe). You will also want to take note of the following bounded-keys and their functions. Make sure to mark "capture all shaders", "capture all textures". I personally prefer to mark "Force windowed mode" aswell to quickly access the desktop. Select "launch" and the applications will force to execute the game within this program. Now, the key to this program is to go to any level and start pressing "F12" to capture that particular scene. The game may freeze for a few seconds, since it is trying to extract the textures from the current field-of-view and direct them to their designated directories. If I were to be at Mamma-Go and start pressing "F12", I can go to my directory and it will list all textures that were in that shot. These files are .dds (DirectDraw Surface) and can be opened with most media players. When I was doing this, one of the following textures came up: The textures for the sign and the posters that can be seen hanging in the Mamma Go Garage. But also the door to the garage and the wall textures were extracted. In execution, there are hundreds of textures that are being extracted within minutes; too many to be shown here, though my current number of textures is 403 data files. It has also come to the attention of the founder of BGEmyth.net Nimitz that certain beta creatures that were not seen in the game (see picture) still had their texture come up in certain levels. The crab creature, as seen in the picture, was a creature in an earlier iterations of Beyond Good & Evil (second interation according to Jade's outfit), but was never seen in the game. It may have had similar features to the Alpha Mini Spider. This means that the creature, or atleast the creature, is placed somewhere within the game but outside the perimeters of the game world (void) and thus never encountered. 3D Geometry (.OBJ files) These files are, in a way, a rough representation of levels within the game. .OBJ files are 3D Geometry representations of the layout of a level, and the basic textures vertices. This means they are purely basic and do not represent textures The way it is captured is similar to the way to capture texture using 3D Ripper DX, you just need to mark "Also Capture Wavefront .OBJ". Wavefront. Open these files, you have to download a modelling program such as Blender(free) , zBrush(paid) or Autodesk Maya Autodesk (Free trial and paid). For this occasions, I will use Blender. Once you capture a certain screen, the .obj files will be extracted to your designate d directory (default C:\User\Documents\3DRipperDX\Frames). If you have installed Blender (or any of the three), you want to go to File > Import > Wavefront (.OBJ) and select a file. For this occasion, I captured some frames during the Hillyan revolution cutscene. I found out that there are two species that do not occur conventionally in Beyond Good & Evil, the small rhinoceros however, has been seen before in beta images. I hope these methods will interest you. ZyLogic (talk) 20:08, July 14, 2014 (UTC) Category:Blog posts